


The Color on Your Robes Says Nothing Pleasant About You

by shefrommo



Series: Four Great Church-Bells (The Tales Nobody Tells) [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Original Work
Genre: A study of the Hogwarts Houses as seen through the lens of my Four Great Church-Bells series, Death is blue, Famine is yellow, Gen, Pestilence is green, War is red
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25042759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shefrommo/pseuds/shefrommo
Summary: In my Four Great Church-Bells series, the Horsemen are associated with two colors each. Their primary colors, however, match very well with the colors of the Hogwarts Houses, and I decided to think through how a character from Four Great Church-Bells would perceive the Houses.In short, Hufflepuff is made of children of Famine, all yellow-golds and ignored. Slytherin is filled with children of Pestilence, dreaming impossible fever-dreams of glory. Gryffindor is home to children of War, robed in reds like blood and hemmed in gilt. Finally, Ravenclaw is perch of the children of Death, seeking knowledge the way Icarus sought freedom and just as doomed to go too far and fall.
Series: Four Great Church-Bells (The Tales Nobody Tells) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1813684
Kudos: 1





	The Color on Your Robes Says Nothing Pleasant About You

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy this! It's mostly just meta, rather than a character study or an actual part of my Four Great Church-Bells series.

**The Four Houses as seen by a resident of the Four Great Church-Bells verse**

Let’s start with Hufflepuff. Yellows and golds, children of Famine. You are loyal and hardworking—kind and patient and humble. You are a duffer, ever overlooked, written off from the moment you don your amber-gold robes. You are children of Famine, you are starving, lacking in resources. You are Sisyphus, rolling his rock up the hill, only for it to fall, you are building bridges to faraway stars, doomed to fail. You are starved for resources; your work will never be complete. You are starved of victory; all your hard work will come to naught. You are starved of attention; nothing you ever do will be noticed or praised, your loyalty taken for granted and discarded. You are ambers and gold, a child of Famine, and _you_ will never be enough for anyone or anything.

Slytherins, then, are green like sickness. You jockey for power, scheme to supplant others who dare to be above you. Envy is only the beginning. Your every exhale is vile, your every word is poison, an infection that spreads to the gullible. Your ambition clouds your mind, blinds your eyes, a fever-dream that you chase to your doom. You think that your triumph, the realization of your goals is your panacea, a cure-all to all your ills. Should you stop and rest, you would see that victory is but a fever-dream always one step out of reach, fluttering out of your grasp. They say you chase a goal fervently; they call your goals dreams—this is why your ambition is a fever, and your dreams are called _dreams_ , hallucinations, the making of a dazed and dizzied mind grasping at straws. You are emerald green, a child of Pestilence, and your mind is sick and turned against you.

Gryffindors, garbed in red and gold, glory in their bravery and nobility and chivalry—modern-day Arthurian knights fighting for the just causes. You think yourself a dashing hero or heroine, a warrior of freedom and all your righteous causes, whatever they may be. You live and fight and die for your morals. You force them upon others; when they protest, you gleefully cast them as the villain in your legend. You are right, they are wrong. Any harm you do to them is fully deserved, because they do not fall in line with your beliefs. You are conflict sculpted in the shape of humans, a battle brewing and waiting for the first blow thrown. You fight in the name of your beliefs—you are a zealot, a fanatic, and when someone finally takes you down, a martyr for your massacre. You are reds like blood and hemmed with gilt, a child of War, and a killer waiting for a cause.

Ravenclaws are blue, blue in the face from arguing meaningless minutiae, blue from too little sunlight, too many hours spent hiding away in the dark. You spend all your time among your books, made of paper, the crushed corpses of plants. You scribble upon your rolls of parchment, soft-beaten skin flayed from the living. You thirst for knowledge; you seek it the way a dying man seeks water. The oasis you seek is within your reach, but you do not realize you are not a traveler, but the encroaching desert, choking it for others. You take what you know and hoard it—it is yours to play and experiment with. When you come to some discovery, you are seized with the fever-dream of glory; the tantalizing image of your name in all your precious books blinds you. You rush to publicize your findings, to be the first, to go down in history as the inventor, the wise one, the one who cried Eureka. News of your discovery spreads and infects others, who hoard away your discovery and make something new of it themselves, and then you are not the only shining beacon of invention. You find yourself in an arms race of innovation and invention, scrambling to be the paragon of creation for your age. In your quest to be the greatest, you experiment, you trip down a rabbit hole, and unlike Alice there is no coming back. One day, your trials will take you across the path of things that humans are not meant to touch, and you will perish for it. An accident, those who remember you will say. A tragic accident, come from too little caution, too much ambition, too much yearning. Death is the penultimate, the culmination of Famine, Pestilence, and War. You are the pale blues of a new corpse’s skin, a child of Death, and you are dying with every thought and motion, every hope seen through to the end and all those thousand wishes left unfulfilled.


End file.
